It is called digital decay, and it is coming to you right now and will not likely ever end. Every digital medium, every cloud service, every computer operating system and every computer program will meet the same fate as the floppy disk.

Scary, isn't it?

"It is a hassle to open a document saved to a floppy disk that was written in the now-extinct Lotus 1-2-3," Kessler writes. "But imagine trying to open tweets without Twitter, recover a note from your cloud-based inbox after the service shuts down, or search for family photos in a Facebook account for which you've lost the password (and drats, the account is attached to that email account that no longer exists)."

People are flocking to the cloud — storing their digital data in online services such as Mozy.com or Dropbox.com where the files are available across multiple computers and devices. Paul Gilster with The News & Observer says this "means giving up a large measure of control to big companies who will store your data."

This is a transfer of responsibility, he says, and leaves people to have to trust the services to keep the data safe. "(If) they drop the ball, we're left with a big cleanup and a potentially devastating loss of data."

Which is what happened to technology journalist Mat Honan.

Honan wrote on Wired about how his digital life was erased: "In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook."

Honan lost "irreplaceable pictures of my family, of my child's first year and relatives who have now passed from this life ."

But if pictures and other valuable data are lost from hackers, cloud companies closing, DVDs and CDs failing or technology becoming outmoded, the results are the same. Precious memories are lost.

That Western Digital survey Ellman was quoting found that 41 percent of adults don't back up their digital files because they don't know how to do it.

Step one is being aware of what can happen. Technology moves forward in steps. A document on a 5.25-inch floppy disk could have been transferred to a 3.5-inch floppy disk easily back when most computers had both drives. Then that data could have been transferred to a CD when most computers featured a 3.5-inch floppy disk and a CD drive. Then the data could be transferred to the computer's hard drive, an external hard drive, and the cloud. Along the way, it could have been opened and resaved in various formats from early text programs to WordPerfect and Word.

Even Honan's loss of photographs of his new baby weren't permanent.

It turns out some of the data was recoverable, Honan got the photos from his wiped laptop back. It cost him $1,690 with a drive recovery company. "Data doesn't come cheap," he says.